notes on interesting digital ephemera

December 01, 2016

The standard story is the steam engine emerged form tinkers and need rather than from science, but ended up fueling science ... "science owes more to steam engines than steam engines owe to science" That has been a matter of dispute in some circles. There were some earlier investigations that were clearly science of the day and important to early progress... I suspect the real truth includes quite a bit of this early science. David Wootton makes a good case in his book The Invention of Science. (recommended read)

November 17, 2016

The audio is probably the best way if you have the time, but there is a short text summary as well as a transcript.

snip

...

In the early 1800s, [slave patrollers] were the de-facto police force in the South, and it was their job to catch runaway slaves and [to] make sure that any black person walking down the street had their papers. They could stop [and] detain any black person, demand to see their papers, and, of course, if you didn't have license to move around freely, you were beaten, taken back to your master, jailed, and it was an early version of stop and frisk. Any white person with the slightest authority could demand to see the bonefides of any black person walking around.

Of course, growing up in the city, I'm acquainted with stop and frisk, with being pulled over by cops, being handcuffed and questioned as I'm going out about my business. ... We have a new name for it — "stop and frisk" — and 200 years ago it was "law and order."

September 29, 2016

Mr. Ullrich, like other biographers, provides vivid insight into some factors that helped turn a “Munich rabble-rouser” — regarded by many as a self-obsessed “clown” with a strangely “scattershot, impulsive style” — into “the lord and master of the German Reich.”

• Hitler was often described as an egomaniac who “only loved himself” — a narcissist with a taste for self-dramatization and what Mr. Ullrich calls a “characteristic fondness for superlatives.” His manic speeches and penchant for taking all-or-nothing risks raised questions about his capacity for self-control, even his sanity. But Mr. Ullrich underscores Hitler’s shrewdness as a politician — with a “keen eye for the strengths and weaknesses of other people” and an ability to “instantaneously analyze and exploit situations.”

• Hitler was known, among colleagues, for a “bottomless mendacity” that would later be magnified by a slick propaganda machine that used the latest technology (radio, gramophone records, film) to spread his message. A former finance minister wrote that Hitler “was so thoroughly untruthful that he could no longer recognize the difference between lies and truth” and editors of one edition of “Mein Kampf” described it as a “swamp of lies, distortions, innuendoes, half-truths and real facts.”

• Hitler was an effective orator and actor, Mr. Ullrich reminds readers, adept at assuming various masks and feeding off the energy of his audiences. Although he concealed his anti-Semitism beneath a “mask of moderation” when trying to win the support of the socially liberal middle classes, he specialized in big, theatrical rallies staged with spectacular elements borrowed from the circus. Here, “Hitler adapted the content of his speeches to suit the tastes of his lower-middle-class, nationalist-conservative, ethnic-chauvinist and anti-Semitic listeners,” Mr. Ullrich writes. He peppered his speeches with coarse phrases and put-downs of hecklers. Even as he fomented chaos by playing to crowds’ fears and resentments, he offered himself as the visionary leader who could restore law and order.

• Hitler increasingly presented himself in messianic terms, promising “to lead Germany to a new era of national greatness,” though he was typically vague about his actual plans. He often harked back to a golden age for the country, Mr. Ullrich says, the better “to paint the present day in hues that were all the darker. Everywhere you looked now, there was only decline and decay.”

April 17, 2016

Gaiman had previously said he would not adapt their 1990 fantasy novel about the end of the world without Pratchett, who died in March 2015 from a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease. Before Pratchett’s death, director Dirk Maggs – at Gaiman’s instigation – adapted Good Omens for BBC Radio 4, which broadcast in 2014 and included cameos from Pratchett and Gaiman. At the time, Gaiman said he had urged Radio 4 to adapt it because: “I want Terry to be able to enjoy this while he’s still able to.”

But Gaiman, who flew into London on Thursday night for a memorial event for Pratchett at the Barbican, announced to whistles and cheers that he would be personally adapting the book for television. He said he had been spurred to change his mind when he was presented with a letter from Pratchett, intended to be read after his death.

Publishing Perspectives, a trade journal for the book publishing industry, reported that consultant Bruce Harris voiced enthusiasm for the role of augmented reality (AR) in publishing, saying there was potential in "a true amalgamation of digital and print."

Not just physical print forms but even digital forms could benefit from AR. Harris said, "In some ways, digital has been "a frozen print experience," in that the reader is often looking at the same thing in both print and digital versions."

Once you add AR, you are experiencing movement, extra sound, "a lot of extra qualities" with the content.

Reading behavior in the AR vein might involve people using their phones or tablet apps to scan their physical page and see extra elements pop up. You are not throwing your printed book into the dustbin to read the same online. Instead, "You use your device to discover more content. The content is digitally appealing and has stuff you can manipulate, but you need the actual book in order to do it."

March 01, 2016

After their financial crisis, Iceland fined the banks and put many of the responsible bankers in prison. Their presidential election is four months away and five candidates have stepped forward so far - not a professional politician in the bunch:

January 18, 2016

Trembley’s first thought was that he had discovered a completely new species. This would turn out to be untrue, as these tiny animals had already been identified by van Leeuwenhoek. The name van Leeuwenhoek gave them was “polyps,” though they would eventually be commonly known as hydras. They were strange creatures, to say the least. Beneath the lens of a microscope, they looked like a cross of a snail, an octopus, and a plant. As Trembley tried to learn more about the little creatures, he cut some of them in half. He was shocked to see that both halves continued to live. He wondered whether he was just witnessing residual movement akin to a severed lizard’s tail. Then something amazing happened. Each half polyp gradually began to regenerate the portions of its body that it had lost. Amazingly, the two halves became two separate creatures.

Trembley sent a summary of his results and a sample of the freshwater polyps to a well-known naturalist in Paris, René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, an important skeptic of the doctrine of preformation who had written an influential paper about the regeneration of crayfish claws. Réaumur repeated Trembley’s steps, cutting the odd specimens into sections. He, too, watched in wonder as the little creatures he had split formed into entirely new creatures. “I could hardly believe my eyes,” he later wrote. “It is a fact that I am not accustomed to seeing after having seen it again hundreds and hundreds of times.” When he presented a demonstration to the Paris Academy of Sciences later that year, the official report on the event compared it to “the story of the Phoenix that is reborn from its ashes,” and asked witnesses to draw their own conclusions “on the generation of animals . . . and perhaps on even higher matters.”

December 23, 2015

“The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home” centers on a child who is lost in space with a robot sidekick and trying to get home. The child sees his or her name written in stars, and flies through the solar system toward earth. After a few wrong turns in the spaceship, the child will see a familiar local landmark — the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower, for example, drawn from a database of hundreds of landmarks — then an aerial map of his or her own neighborhood, and finally, an image of a door with his or her own home address.

To create the book, customers enter the child’s name, gender and home address, which will be kept confidential; choose one of three character types with varying hair and skin tones; and select one of nine available languages. The software generates a preview of the book, and once an order is placed, a unique book is made at one of 10 print-on-demand locations around the world. The company sells its books directly to customers, for $30 each, through its website, making it more like the eyewear retailer Warby Parker or the online razor company Harry’s than a typical children’s book publisher.